How about a t-shirt sale to celebrate the event?
Bob Roy, UW Alum
---- Wayne Smith <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Today is the 20th anniversary of Hockey-L! Twenty years ago, Mike Machnik
> and a great team of fans from around college hockey, having created the
> aptly named the College_Hockey mailing list a couple of years earlier,
> turned hosting over to "maine.edu", later to be "lists.maine.edu".
> "college_hockey" grew out "news"/"NetNews" hockey groups that had more than
> a little childish ranting and was dominated by pro hockey discussions.
>
> With Listserv as the distribution software and lots of energy from many
> people, Hockey-L grew rapidly from the several dozen core contributors to
> many thousands of readers at its peak. Hockey-L had about 3000 subscribers
> and half a dozen or so redistributions, mostly on various campus NetNews
> groups. At this peak, we had hundreds of posts per day in-season. I'd spend
> a couple of hours per day putting together a daily compendium, leaving out
> the crud ... that was the only way to keep many of the readers we were
> trying to attract (movers and shakers, administrators, coaches, players).
> My secretary would put together a weekly compendium of posts she thought
> Shawn Walsh might want to see, and whenever we played a team we didn't know
> much about, I'd put together a packet on them for Shawn. He'd read them on
> the bus/plane a week ahead of the game. For other stories and
> recollections, see the Hockey-L archives at
> http://lists.maine.edu/archives/hockey-l.html
>
> Today, the redistributions are gone and Listserv creates its digests
> automatically for those that want it, and in several formats ... but with
> the decrease in volume of posts and with the filtering enjoyed by most
> people's e-mail client, it's hardly needed.
>
> Some of the college hockey web sites of today have writers that once wrote
> on Hockey-L. It's great to see they found a way to make some money while
> exercising their talent for writing and passion for college hockey. There
> probably isn't a D-I rink in the land without a few current or former
> Hockey-Lers in attendance. ;-)
>
> Cheers, Wayne
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